Claude Lanzmann’s “The Last of the Unjust”

There are some terrific films on view in this year’s New York Film Festival, which starts tonight. Of those I’ve seen so far, one is historic: Claude Lanzmann’s “The Last of the Unjust” (screening this Sunday). It’s not just because of the subject, as there are plenty of banal, insignificant documentaries about aspects of the Holocaust. Lanzmann is a director whose art and aesthetic imagination have marked the age no less than his historical investigations.

It takes twenty minutes for Benjamin Murmelstein, the interviewee who is the title participant, to appear on-screen. First comes a text crawl by Lanzmann that sets forth the historical background regarding the “model” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, and the three successive “Elders of the Jews” who were the chief administrators appointed by German officials to carry out their orders. Murmelstein, the last of the three, was the only one to survive the war—after which he was arrested in Czechoslovakia for collaboration. The charges were dropped, but he has nonetheless been considered, by some Jews, to have been a traitor.

The interviews with Murmelstein, from 1975, done in Rome, where he lived in self-described exile, were the first that Lanzmann conducted for “Shoah” (but he didn’t include them in that film). Before Lanzmann shows any of that interview footage, however, he presents himself, now, at the train station in the Czech Republic where Jews disembarked (or, as he says, “were disembarked”—forcibly) for Theresienstadt. Then he visits the well-preserved remnants of the camp itself. There, he reads selections from Murmelstein’s 1961 book, “Terezin, il Ghetto Modello di Eichmann” (which, as far as I know, hasn’t been translated into English). The selections are—it’s no paradox to say so—beautiful. Murmelstein wrote with an extraordinary sense of detail that, in its unfolding of cruel inflictions in the slightest interaction, embodies a finely contained fury. And, with the aid of Murmelstein’s written account, Lanzmann, going from the station to the camp, entering the camp, and climbing rickety steps in a former barracks (at the age of eighty-seven), imagines himself into an unfathomable past—”a world upside-down.”

Murmelstein was a leading rabbi in Vienna when he was tapped, in 1938, to help organize the forced departure of the city’s Jews—and, as such, he had the misfortune of working directly under Adolf Eichmann, who was famously depicted by Hannah Arendt as a “banal” perpetrator of evil. Murmelstein contradicts this account—for instance, in revealing Eichmann’s vigorous physical participation in the depredations of Kristallnacht as well as his explicit death threats regarding deported Jews. Some of Murmelstein’s most extraordinary remarks, throughout the film, concern the finely tuned administrative torture inherent in the Nazis’ exercise of absolute power. He describes life in Theresienstadt as a sort of “death in slow motion,” a “model” camp with its simulacra of free and autonomous life conducted in the shadow of executions and feared deportations to “the East” (which, the camp inhabitants ultimately learned, meant Auschwitz).

But the first on-camera remarks of Murmelstein’s that Lanzmann includes in “The Last of the Unjust” refer to the rabbi’s own state of exile in Rome and the lessons of Rome for modernity. Just as the city of Rome endures long after the end of Roman civilization, so, Murmelstein explains, all of Europe is enduring the absence of another vanished civilization—that of Judaism. “Judaism is missing,” Murmelstein says. “It is lacking from the world that was destroyed.” In “The Last of the Unjust,” Lanzmann attempts to put back some of the Judaism. He films a cantor chanting Kol Nidre (from the service of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement) and the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, in the last surviving synagogue in Vienna. He films the Old-New Synagogue in Prague—and there finds stelae inscribed with the names of Czech victims of the Holocaust, a litany of names that ring to the eye with a music of their own. There’s a defiant, in-your-face aspect to the filming of the liturgy—the destruction of the Jewry of Europe also meant an attempt to destroy Judaism, but Jewish religious observance has survived.

Hanukkah means “dedication,” and the holiday celebrates a miracle by which the Second Temple, defiled by marauders, was rededicated, resanctified. “The Last of the Unjust” is itself a sort of rededication, an attempt by Lanzmann to restore something central to the Jewish world of Europe. And he achieves this through the words and the story of Murmelstein, a rabbi who took on an unbearable burden and came through it a pariah. Murmelstein’s efforts to save Jews are revealed to be inseparable from his work, under Nazi authority, to preserve the sham of Theresienstadt—he thinks of himself as a sort of Scheherazade who rescued Jews, and who rescued himself, by helping the Germans tell a propagandistic story. That astonishingly daring and dangerous moral calculus has a Biblical grandeur, horror, and authority.

Writing, last year, about Lanzmann’s second book, “Le Tombe du Divin Plongeur” (not yet translated), I discussed Lanzmann’s films in terms of “the personal assumption of the burden of Jewish history (in particular, the black hole of devastation that is the Holocaust) in order to embody and to transmit Jewish identity in [the] present tense.” In “The Last of the Unjust,” Lanzmann films himself repeatedly at Theresienstadt; films himself at Nisko (the site of a ghetto, in Poland, that Murmelstein was ordered to organize, and where he witnessed the deaths of elderly Jews on forced marches); films himself in Prague, from which Jews, possessed of false hope by the promise of the “model” ghetto, were deported, most to their death.

“Shoah” is a masterwork of reflexive filmmaking, in which the conditions of its production are inseparable from its artistic and moral substance. The subject of “Shoah” is, as Lanzmann has said, death. The subject of “The Last of the Unjust” is life. The miracle that it conjures is that of survival. It’s a miracle that anyone came out of the camps alive. It’s a miracle that Murmelstein, in his position of terrifying proximity to barbaric overlords, was able to save as many Jews as he did—and to save himself. It’s a miracle that Judaism itself, as a religion and an ongoing element of history, survived.

As Lanzmann films himself into that history—in an act of imaginative sympathy with deportees and with Murmelstein—he himself partakes of the miracle of survival and accepts the profound responsibility that survival places on him. “The Last of the Unjust” is a solemn celebration, a secular rite. It concludes with a moment of cinematic ceremony, a master touch of rhetorical exaltation by a director in search of images that convey the awesome, quasi-metaphysical power—as much religious as historical—of Murmelstein and of his incommensurable experiences and deeds. The moral magnitude of the effort is suggested in the nearly forty-year gap—itself a fearsome menace—that it took Lanzmann to make the film.

Photograph: Synecdoche Production.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.